HOMI K. BHABHA AND THE MIXED BLESSINGOF HYBRIDITY IN BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICSJin Hee Han, New York Theological Seminary

Jin Hee Han is Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary, New York,NY, USA.

Correspondence to Jin Hee Han: professorhan@yahoo.com

Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory offers a great potential for a new landscape in the interpretation ofthe biblical literature that was produced and consumed in the imperial and colonial contexts of antiquity.The notions of hybridity and mimicry Bhabha has elucidated are particularly rich in implication for a reviseddescription of the complex web of political and cultural negotiations in ancient Israel. The fruition of thehermeneutic implications of the problematics of hybridity on biblical studies awaits the formulation ofconcrete strategies to engage the powers that be in the contemporary still-colonial world.

Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory has been at once celebrated for insight and berated forincomprehensibility. Bhabha’s luminance comes from his uncanny way of mining the complexpower relationship involved in the production and consumption of discourses in the contemporarypostcolonial world. Like a spirited shaman who turns common words into potent spells of exor-cism, Bhabha not only dispels the specter of pure culture with the realism of hybridity, but alsospoils the intricate, delectable misunderstanding between the coloniser and the colonised withthe image of mimicry, as he draws a new map of the past and the present with the clearing ofsome third space that ‘quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture asa homogenizing, unifying force’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 37). In the third space the Ralph Ellisonianinvisible could ‘fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts thathaunt the historical present’ (p. 12), and write their own history with the ‘right to signify’ (pp.231-234). The underdogs of the colonial world can now conceptualise a world governed by dy-namics different from those in the neocolonial situation.

Bhabha’s incisive strike at the grip of colonial discourse on the past and the present pluckedout of the historical continuum is mystified by his impenetrable writing style, which may havebeen exacerbated by the ethos of the literature department; however, more significantly, thedensity of his discourse has to do with the complexity – virtually, if not absolutely, impossibleto untangle – of the postcolonial deconstruction he advocates. Once the thick layers of his paddedsentences are traversed, if not penetrated, the strokes of his postcolonial program do emerge witha dose of ambiguity to suggest a huge sum of potential for exegetical fresh air, especially enticingin the light of the nature of the biblical literature produced and consumed in the colonial contextof antiquity.

In biblical studies, the locus of the fixation of Torah is commonly dated to the Persian period,in which, as Jon Berquist points out, Yehud was a Persian colony whose condition was determinedby the colonial political situation (Berquist 1995). While the traditional historiography of ancientIsrael has long been shackled by the paradigmatic juxtaposition of the exilic and postexilic periods,the contemporary scholarship of ancient Israel has debunked successfully the artificial watershedin the temporal continuum. Berquist gives an expression to the persisting colonial grip on Yehud,when he says, ‘From this perspective, there is no “exile” (absence of people from the land) followedby “restoration” (a failed goal of return to self-rule in the old fashion, by elites who came from

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Babylonia)’ (p. 10). The biblical land almost always toiled under the colonial grip of the strongerforeign powers, and the biblical corpus was trimmed under the watch and ward of the colonialpowers of the ancient Near East.

Bhabha’s beacon offers torrential potential that could open another phase in biblical inter-pretation through the awareness of the absolute grip of colonial forces at play in antiquity. Thenew direction his study lifts up is rich in implications for the political responsibility of the present,as well; however, the question remains as to exactly where the new era is to be located, especiallywith the issue couched in a mixture of the temporal interrogations and the spatial queries. Hiscall for the dismantling of the colonial grip on history, literature, and society, and his prescriptions– effective, even though notoriously illegible – warms the biblical exegete’s heart, yes, strangely,but, at the same time, his refreshing recasting of ambivalent hybridity may even conjure euphoriawhere contemporary hermeneutics has often reached aporia – an interpretive cul-de-sac not alltoo uncommon in postmodern/postcolonial discourses. In spite of his clear discomfort aboutleaving the negotiation between theory and politics as an endless interrogatory exercise (Bhabha1994 pp. 29-31), a pivotal question persists: whether the hybrid blessing can mend the woes inthis postcolonial, or to be more precise, this still-colonial world. At the risk of repetition, thequestion may be redressed for biblical studies: Can Bhabha’s postcolonialism finally uncover thetrue vision of the biblical past and guide biblical scholars to hear the voices of biblical traditioninterested in social change and the shalom of high and low, poor and rich, haves and have-nots,and all in between?1 Or, will it go down the alley of history as a celebrated commodity of what

Graham Huggan terms as ‘alterity industry’ in the market of the ‘postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan2001).

HOMI BHABA AT HIS BEST AND HYBRIDITY IN BIBLICAL STUDIESThe best behest of Bhabha is passed on in his call for the re-assessment of what used to be takenfor granted in previous studies of literature and history. Political discourses had been formulatedunder the politicised notion of the impervious binary of the coloniser and the colonised,2 which

Bhabha and others expose as a fictional construct concocted to justify the existing structure ofdomination. Cultures, ancient and modern, had been studied with the premise of forces at workto ward off foreign contamination, even though cultures have always been formed through aplethora of alien elements that came in different times with different people, making it inadvisableto postulate a preferred culture and conclude that one culture is superior to the other. RobertJC Young refers to the methodological tendency toward exclusion in fields of scientific research,when he says, ‘Historically... comparatively little attention has been given to the mechanics ofthe intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunction. In archaeology, forexample, the models have been ones of diffusion, assimilation or isolation, not of interaction orcounteraction’ (Young 1995 p. 5). Bhahba’s notion of cultural hybridity reorients the lens inhistorical studies, so that they ‘may challenge normative expectations of development and progress’(Bhabha 1994 p. 2). The negotiation of hybridities may well represent a paradigm shift in thecontemporary historiography.

Biblical studies has also been conducted with a quasi-ethical evaluation of higher religionsconfigured as undefiled versions in opposition to syncretistic mixtures. The notion of hybridityhelps to demolish the myth of pure religion and true theology as value-free categories, and exposes

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how power structures have politicised them to advance their agenda of social engineering. HomiBhabha’s postcolonial approach invites responsible readings of biblical literature that challengeand rewrite history and exegesis to right the exploitive past and to write the postcolonial future.Traditional historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation depended on analysis to sep-arate the object of inquiry from the text, but Bhabha’s method would caution that the analyticalmode culturally specific to the West has done nothing but ‘calm violence’ (Foucault) to history(Bhabha 1995 pp. 326-343).3

Historical-critical exegesis has been cited facetiously for analysis paralysis, and the unhealth-iness has often come from the misdiagnosis that subjected a healthy patient of hybrid identity toa misguided surgical attempt to remove the inherent complexity of history or something thatlooks like history. Trajectories of biblical traditions have eluded methodological control in vitro,for the forces that shape history tend to be hybridised and are not readily sorted out in vivo.Nonetheless, thousands of tomes of constructive history and eternity-mimicking theology arenow readily available, if not voraciously consulted, on the shelves of theological libraries.

The hybrid nature of the biblical literature may seem to be self-evident under the postcolonialoptic, but even a cursory look at the past history of biblical interpretation demonstrates thathybrid situations within biblical accounts have had a troubled history. Theological traditionsand laws have often been evaluated under the ideal of a unified people under one God. WhileGod often appears surrounded by other divine beings in many places in the biblical corpus, thehefty Deuteronomic God-alone theology has been proffered as the dominant theme in the so-called biblical theology. As a Swedish theologian B.-E. Benktson comments, however, an isolatedGod is ‘a projection of alienated modern man’ (cited in Mettinger 1998 p. 133), and the theologyof a lonely God has more to do with the loneliness of modern male theologians than the traditionsof the ancient Near East.

Aversion to hybridities is palpable in the investigation of the history of Israel in every phasein the fashion of Foucaultian ‘omnipresence of power’ (Foucault 1978 p. 93). The study of thepremonarchic memory of Israel – whether it reflects an ancient tradition or is a later construct4

– has often been presented in terms of Canaanite-Israelite binary. The law that prohibits boilinga kid in its mother’s milk (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21), which has given rise to the traditionthat separates milk and meat, has at times been cited as a case of requiring separation fromCanaanite religious practices. In this scenario ‘mixed’ means ‘mess’.

In the Priestly legislation, the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26) mandates separation from theCanaanite religious practices. In the prominently apodictic language, Leviticus 18 stipulatesseparation from the religious prescriptions of the Canaanites (18:3, huqqōtēhem, ‘their statutes’)at the pain of expulsion from the land. It couches the legal requirements in terms of cultic defile-ment through the violation of taboos geared toward preservation of purity in family relationships.Leviticus 19 follows to establish ‘the assumed connection between pagan worship and sexualdegeneracy – both are regarded as the causes of exile’ (Levine 1989 p. 135). Laws for ethical andritual holiness (Leviticus 19, 20-24) then enclose the prominently casuistic language of Leviticus20, which outlaws the Canaanite worship of Molech along with kinship violations and homo-sexual practices in the juxtaposition of homophobia and xenophobia (Levine 1989 p. 123).5

The narrative tradition of the Hebrew Bible includes an episode of murmuring in the bookof Numbers attributed to a group to which the MT gives an incidental, if pejorative, description

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of ’asafsuf from the root ’sf, suggesting a collection of problematic elements (Num 11:4). TheLXX renders the ominous hapax legomenon as epimiktos, a mixed group, enticing many com-mentators to posit a definable group that came out of Egypt with the Hebrews (cf. Exod 12:38).The same Greek word appears in the LXX book of Nehemiah for the families of mixed marriages(‘of foreign descent’ in the NRSV translation) Nehemiah targeted for the policy of forced separ-ation as a violent measure to reconstitute the pure Yehud (Neh 13:4). The repeated attempts tosustain the ideology of one people – each with its own political agenda – have created a generalnotion that the biblical tradition contains a unified policy statement that prescribes appropriatemarital relationships by excluding contact with others in the region and other religions.

Alongside the mandate of separation, the under-voiced side of the biblical literature suggestsanother discursive exercise not categorically opposed to the formation of identity through ‘acomplex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in momentof historical trans-formation’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 2). Apart from the ongoing debate on the dateof Israel’s origins, the assembly at Shechem in Joshua 24 suggests that early Israel was a mixedgroup from beyond the Euphrates and the Nile.6 In the Solomonic Period, the Temple of Jerusalem

is constructed by the joint efforts of Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders – the Phoenician(foreign!) skilled hands (1 Kings 5:32; ET 5:18). Timber and timbre for the Temple came fromTyre. Centuries later, in a most celebrated case of religious purification, King Josiah went outand demolished the high places as part of his Deuteronomistic reform in the seventh century.While Josiah’s royal policy of religious purge represents an ethos of an exclusive religion, onemust wonder what these local sanctuaries were doing in the first place all over Judah and whathad been Israel. Other pieces of literature that challenge the particularistic tendency in Israel in-clude the book of Ruth, the book of Jonah, and so-called Third Isaiah (Bright 1981 pp. 442-446).7 These intermittent voices of hybridities bear testimony to the presence of social protest in

the biblical literature against the forces that attempt to shape social order in terms of the so-calledunadulterated purity of religion and culture.

Repeated discourses that problematise crosscultural fertilisation also render additional supportto the thesis that cultural negotiation was a highly energising issue in biblical times. Homi Bhabha’scall for the recognition of hybridity in the postcolonial identity takes biblical scholars to task,as the biblical world reveals itself replete with hybrid situations and contexts.

COUNTING BLESSINGSAs one of the colossal blessings Homi Bhabha brings to biblical studies, the notion of hybriditymakes it not only possible but also imperative to rewrite the history and theology of Israel – orperhaps the entire landscape of biblical interpretation. The re-presentation of the history of Israelfrom such an optic is a task that bears and nurses the yearning of silenced voices that were pre-viously denied access to discursive representation. It goes without saying that the same concernthat Gayatri Spivak voiced for the subaltern who were not permitted to speak (Spivak 1988 pp.271-313) should impact the shape of the revised history of Israel.

In the revisionist history under his aegis, it is Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity that canintroduce a new set of rules of narration. He identifies fluid identity as the major battlegroundin postcolonial negotiation, and clears the table of discussion with the declaration that identityis a mixed, boundary-crossing category. Cultures that came together in the land of Canaan in

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the colonial and imperial matrix of the ancient Near East also were not merely diverse, but dif-ferent. Diversity, a major category in multiculturalism, calls for harmony, but it is naïveté tothink that human societies could achieve cultural harmony, which presupposes delineable culturalboundaries, which can in turn only be obtained by the master’s preemptive historiography – likethe Gospel according to Pharaoh. The third space Bhabha envisions makes it possible to re-readthe text and to re-write the interpretation of the text forged in a world of many different – notjust diverse – cultures. In this connection, his postcolonial optic calls for a politically responsiblereading through ‘the negotiation of cultural difference in a way that is liberating for those caughtin oppressive situations’ (Runions 2001 p. 75) in the light of the ‘possibility of resituating thesubject through the negotiation of cultural difference’ (p. 76; italics hers).

The origin of Israel is accurately and fruitfully understood as a hybrid process in which dif-ferent groups came together and formulated a hybrid response to the challenges faced in life.Hybridity continues from the premonarchic era down to the colonial entanglements of the firstmillennium BCE, and takes different shapes, as well as different ingredients.

Scholars who have tackled the reconstruction of the premonarchic history from the perspectiveof social-scientific criticism have described the process of the settlement of Israel in Canaan inMarxist terms – in terms of the conflict between the tributary mode of production and thecommunitarian mode of production (Gottwald 1979). In the ideological topography redrawnfrom Bhabha’s perspective of hybridity, one may recast the whole project resulting in an amal-gamation of various competing modes of production, instead of presenting the exodus as a triumphof the communitarian cause. The paradigm of hybridity facilitates a more balanced historiographythan previous scholarship has managed to produce, for a revolution that resulted in a purecommunitarian mode of production is found neither in antiquity nor in (post)modernity.

The most celebrated period of the United Monarchy saw many cultures being amalgamatedto form an empire; in this time the kingdom of Israel itself was the coloniser. Hybridity may ac-count for some of the surge in political and cultural energy that was large enough to provideroom for both encomium of royal achievements and subtle protest for the court scribes or wisdomteachers in this period.8 The Yahwist, a theoretical construct posited to explain the composite

nature of the Torah, makes a near-perfect illustration. Many historical critical scholars have readthe myth of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 as propagating the notion of all human beings descendingfrom one set of parents in order to regroup the diverse groups of people under the one imperial-istic regime of the United Monarchy (von Rad 1962–1965).9 Using mythical images of the same

parents for all peoples, however, the Yahwist, who is clearly part of the establishment, may havebeen satirical at the same time about the monarchic system, as James Kennedy suggests in hisallegorical interpretation of Genesis 2-3 (Kennedy 1990 pp. 3-14). Kennedy recasts the story ofAdam and Eve as the story of peasants placed to take care of the manor of the king representedby Yahweh.10 Yahweh’s prohibition concerning the tree of knowledge of good and evil is metaphor

for the king’s exclusive claim to determine what is good and what is evil. Adam and Eve, thepeasants, are assisted by a serpent, a demagogue who enables them to discern the structure ofdomination. They revolt, only to be cracked down upon and expelled from the king’s land. In amode similar to Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, which creates a ‘double vision which in disclosingthe ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 88; italics his)the subversive Yahwist mimics the rhetoric of the best world under royal control, but that

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mimicry portrays a picture of a nervous land owner, the king in the Lacanian camouflage. Whilethe regime has worked to mold a leadership in support of the throne, the court scribes, as theymimic traditional discourses, may not have been entirely supportive of the ruling powers. TheUnited Monarchy had the latitude to permit such a clandestine carnival of political protest onthe part of Yahwist, an otherwise loyal subject in the monarchic polity of ancient Israel.

Other scribes and wisdom teachers who have offered proverbs may also have been practicingmimicry as they pose themselves as affirming the existing structure while satirising the erraticbehavior of kings. ‘A wise king winnows the wicked, and drives the wheel over them’ (Prov20:26) could not only be read as the royal passion for justice but also as the royal obsession overcontrol and the royal propensity toward cruelty. Prov 30:27, which states ‘the locusts have noking, yet all of them march in rank’, may have been just as much a political commentary on theunneeded, unwanted monarchy as an entomological observation of some smart locusts. The sageconjugates the traditional rhetoric of wisdom, when he says, ‘Three things are stately in theirstride, four are stately in their gait: the lion…; the strutting rooster, the he-goat, and a king…’(Prov 30:29-31). This interpretive approach to the book of Proverbs can reshape the interpretivelandscape around the wisdom of antiquity.

In a comparable fashion, Homi Bbabha’s mimicry deconstructs the absolute grip of royalpower on the life of the people and opens a space that makes it possible to raise a subtle voiceof protest. Bhabha calls the space that enables one to dream and design a new world ‘third space’,‘in-between space’, or, borrowing Emmanuel Levinas, ‘interstice’. These terms are partly an in-dictment on the optimism of progress in knowledge to be a force that dismantles the structureof colonial domination. A Bhabhaistic liberating exegesis does not come from mere adjustmentsof any current space but from the creation of a new space. Bhabha’s third space demonstratesthat history cannot simply be revised; it needs to be reinscribed from a new location.

Homi Bhabha’s category of hybridity is highly useful for understanding the cultural back-ground of biblical literature and has the potential as a hermeneutic corrective to the assumedpurity of the so-called critical approaches. From Bhabha to Bible one finds that it is not just thecontemporary world that is hybrid.11 Ancient cultures were also hybridised. Some of the most

flourishing times of culture in Israel were an ambivalent time of interwoven cultures, such as theUnited Monarchy under David and Solomon, the reign of the Omride Dynasty, and most remark-ably the hybrid subjectivities that bloomed in the exile and thereafter. In contrast, the uncertaincourse of cultural negotiation is perceived to be an extreme threat in the postexilic era when thecommunity is struggling with meager resources to redefine their identity as Israel and reconstitutea definable people in the shadow of Persia.

DISCOUNTING BLESSINGSWhile hybridity is an accurate description of the world, both ancient and modern, its ubiquityin Bhabha’s system may be damaging to its efficacy as an incisive tool of historical description.He lifts hybridity as a model of a postcolonial blind spot, but hybridity has more to do withhuman reality than postcolonial identity. Furthermore, the structure of oppression has beensustained not because no one has been able to see the reality of hybridity but because politicalleaders and religious leaders or peddlers of knowledge and power have used it as one of the toolsof political control, counting it as something that needs to be corrected by the intervention of

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rightful powers. Other excuses for political legitimatisation include the divine election, controlover moral laxity, maintenance of social order, and the value of rightful lineage. Among the le-gitimising strategies of power, the foray of hybridity may have been particularly attractive becauseit appears to reduce the number of factors the force in power (colonisers, actual or symbolic)had to control.

To deconstruct the problematics of hybridity is certainly another ‘giant leap for mankind[sic]’ toward correcting the misconception of the value attached to the constructs of purity.Postcolonial critical theory received a shot in the arm in 1994, when many of Homi K. Bhabha’sessays were collected together in the unified volume, The Location of Culture.12 He clearly

presents a possibility of a postcolonial new unheimlich configuration as one of the goals ofstudying history in The Location of Culture. The significance the essays had in their previousmanifestation is consistently augmented by their physical assembly into an edited whole. AsHomi Bhabha’s chapters appear one after the other under the same cover, however, the readermay be tempted to expect some definite answer to unfold in the subsequent chapters, only tofind that the answer is postponed.

Homi Bhabha does invest a great deal of thought in the potential of resistance in mimicry as‘one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (Bhabha 1994p. 85). Since mimicry means that the master’s instruction is not fully fulfilled, there is a ridiculefactor. ‘[Q]uite contrary to the “intention” of the colonizer, in that mimicry produces subjectswhose “not-quite sameness” acts like a distorting mirror which fractures the identity of the colo-nizing subject’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997 p. 121). Concerning the materiality of the resistance inpostcolonial discourse, however, Anthony Easthope asks: ‘Is the resistance Bhabha detects incolonialist discourse a sign of the active resistance of the colonized? Or is the ambivalence in factan effect which could be detected in any text, but has been tracked down in the colonialist textby Bhabha himself? (Easthope 2002. p. 52). More bluntly, does mimicry really represent a con-scious social protest? Both in the East and in the West mimicry is involved in a major means ofpedagogical assimilation, and often is dubbed mimesis. What then makes mimicry a performativeact of protest and resistance?

In lieu of any clear answer to the question, there is a hopeless solipsism in mimicry. Onlythose who have been well acculturated in the dominant structure could pull off mimicry effectivelywith a tint of protest. There is even a certain self-congratulatory aspect to calling this mimicrya political theory. Those who had the privilege to learn the master’s discourses can now claim aclear conscience. Mimicry in colonial times is a mixed category that is made up of survivalmechanisms, opportunism, fascination, messiah-complex, and many other elements of intellectuallaundry. To call mimicry a measure of subtle protest has the danger of beautifying the meagerdiscomfort retrospectively into a noble act of resistance. It is a case of the commentary that im-proves the text; as a Korean proverb says, ‘Always better than the dream is its interpretation’.

For a sober interpretation from a postcolonial perspective, Homi Bhabha posits a third space,which is some kind of ‘in between’ space between the negotiators and the negotiated. But exactlywhat is in between except empty space? Exactly who has access to that desirable, ethereal realestate? His programmatic question asks: ‘How are subjects formed in between, or in excess of,the sum of the parts of difference?’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 2) Does the in-between space aid the situations

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of the people who belong to no place – the uprooted, subalterns, dalits, vagabonds, and the ex-pendable in Gerhard Lenski’s paradigm of social stratification? (Lenski 1984).

As the chapters in The Location of Culture repeat a promise of an elusive third space, thereader is constantly told to keep on looking for the space. Bhabha emphatically speaks of socialchange, but the contours of the change are not laid out specifically. One has only to suspect thatit is hidden in the complicated arguments Bhabha articled in The Location of Culture. To drawup any plan of change may be premature and even oppressive in that it preempts the voice ofthe people. Yet, the lack of clear statements makes it impossible to respond to the political changehis hermeneutic vision is calling for, let alone offer tools to assess it. While it does not spell outthe kind of change it would advocate, it tends to create an illusion that merely posits the possi-bilities of change without ever specifying what form the change should take.

Even if one grants that it is a mode of protest, does mimicry seek an out-and-out socialchange? Bhabha often mentions the word ‘resistance’ as deconstructionists habitually do; however,what form and goal of resistance is in view? Perhaps, for the sake of argument, it might be usefulto distinguish protest from resistance. Protest calls for a social change, but usually within thecurrent social resources; resistance pursues the change of the master. Postcolonial struggle hasundoubtedly included struggles of rigorous opposition, but do postcolonial protests of mimicrynecessarily translate into resistance? Or, will the answer to that question remain, in parody ofBhabha (1994 p. 91), ‘almost but not quite’?13

The world is indebted to Homi Bhabha for lifting up the interstitial space or imagining thepossibility of it; however, the third space he has carved up as ‘in-between’ and served as ‘beyond’may be as elusive as a desert mirage or even, perhaps, outlandish enough to be beyond realityaltogether. One is left to deal with the still-colonial world. Bhabha’s third space is a liberatingcategory, but until it is secured, it may remain only a telling commentary of the homeless stateof the postcolonial, who has been driven out of his or her own first space and told to find a thirdspace without traversing a second space, which now really sounds like quantum physics.

RECOUNTING BLESSINGSTo shy away from Bhabha’s ‘babelian performance’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 135)14 and to give up on

social changes altogether would recall the proverbial admonition against a hermeneutics of despair.His perspective helps to uncover the burden of the illusion of past exegesis, and suggests thepossibility of finding new ways to describe what has transpired. It even invigorates the exegeticaldiscussion, exposing that there is no neutral reading. Every reading, which is neither void ofideology nor free of impact, affects social change in one way or the other, and an interpretershould be aware of certain social obligations that come with the act of interpretation.

For postcolonial interpreters, the notion of hybridity heralds that they will now face agreater challenge than that encountered in the days of anti-colonialism. There is no longer a placethat may be described as ‘behind enemy lines,’ not because Jesus’ love command has been suc-cessful, but because there is no longer an enemy line that helps to tell friend from foe. For post-colonial criticism to be relevant, it has to make its strategy and objective clear. Instead of claimingwhat could be interpreted as measures of protest by means of abstruse sentences, postcolonialposture has to introduce a straightforward engagement with colonial powers.

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One cannot afford to miss Bhabha’s call to reclaim the discursive right, as he postulates thattheory alone, couched in poetic density, has the power to bring about political changes (Bhabha1994 pp. 18-28). Best and Kellner call for the kind of theory that helps to unravel today’s world,when they say, ‘Mapping contemporary social, political, and cultural reality requires developmentof a strong macro social theory built firmly on historical and empirical analysis of the presentage’ (Best and Kellner 1991 p. 301). Revolutionary change from literary criticism is rare in spiteof sporadic claims otherwise, but is not impossible.

ONCE FOR ALL THINGS CONSIDEREDMany avant-garde projects have trodden the proverbial path of morphing into a voice of the es-tablishment. One may find postcolonial discourses having already become part of the dominantdiscourses in modern world, too. Postcolonial approach, with its ambiguous in-between hybridity,may be even more vulnerable to the same critique than other theoretical protests as well as tocharges of no roadmap for social change. As Leela Gandhi observes:

Postmodern/poststructuralist commentators argue that postcolonialism is in

danger of becoming yet another totalizing method and theory. On the other

side, Marxist and materialist critics have vociferously made the charge that

postcolonial analysis lacks the methodological structure, and will to totalize,

necessary for right thinking and left politics (Gandhi 1998 p. 167).

Perhaps unfairly, fairly, or somewhere in between, Bhabha has been suspected of elitism, but hemakes an important ‘distinction... between the institutional history of critical theory and itsconceptual potential for change and innovation’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 31). While Bhabha does notrush to devise a plan for a radical restructuring of society, he has provided a set of terms toportray the contemporary world in a more sober manner than ever.

Even after Bhahba, however, the dismantling of the colonial structure is far from actualised.There must have been a good reason for the apocalyptic writers at the end of the Old Testamentperiod to posit their new world on the other side of history (jenseits) and never to claim that thehumans would be able to build the eschatological reign of God. The apocalyptic temporal spaceis to be brought by the divine, and one can only welcome it. Any effort to build a kingdom(whether politically or ideologically) runs the risk of becoming its own oppression, depriving thefuture of what it could bring.

Homi Bhabha dreams of relocating to this side of history (diesseits) the materialisation ofwhat the ancient apocalyptists hoped for – ‘to touch the future on its hither side’ (Bhabha 1994p. 7). A dream is an elusive reality, and can be blissful, as long as the dreamer does not wake up,as the ancient Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu experienced and explicated (II.1.ii.11). While ‘we havebeen trapped in our own history’ (Foucault quoted by Young 1995 p. 28) and while postmodernconjoviality continues its rap into the night, the postcolonial question of conviviality persists andtwo thirds of the world crane forward to what the ancient Hebrew prophets described as shalom,a familiar word virtually, if not absolutely, impossible to translate into the English language.The night of colonial grip is still young (temporal), and the dawn of peace and justice is far(spatial). The birth pangs of a past-colonial world have continued much too long, and thepromise of the baby has long passed the due date.

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ENDNOTES1

Biblical studies over the last several decades has seen the flowering of seminal treatment of the socio-political reality of the Fertile Crescent from the postcolonial optic, whose proponents include Pui-lan Kwok, Fernando F. Segovia. R. S. Sugirtharajah et al, though at times they seem somewhat obli-vious to the indebtedness to the traditional critical methods that facilitate their deconstruction of thehistorical critical exegesis, risking the danger of remaining as an intradiscourse of the academia. Someof the most important works in postcolonial exercise include Discovering the Bible in the Non-biblicalWorld by Pui-lan Kwok (1995); Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins by FernandoF. Segovia (2000); Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation by R.S. Sugirtharajah (2002);and Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theologyby R.S. Sugirtharajah (2003).

2Cf. Michel Foucault, who argues that ‘there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition betweenrulers and ruled at the root of power relations… One must suppose rather that the manifold relation-ships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limitedgroups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the socialbody as a whole’ (Foucault 1978 p. 94).

3Bhabha borrows the phrase from Michel Foucault (1970). He laments that Foucault’s ‘calm violence’fails to assign an adequate role for the colonial history, but proceeds to postulate that Foucault’sforgetful discourse can facilitate the launch of the postcolonial text. See also Bhabha 1994 p. 196.

4For the view that approaches ancient Israel as a later historical construct, see Niels Peter Lemke (1988)and Philip R. Davies (1992).

5Levine points further to Genesis 19 and Judges 19, in which ‘the form of attack was homosexual as-sault’.

6The corollary of this observation is that the framework of the tribes of Israel in the Hebrew Bible isa later historian’s feat of integrating various roots of Israel (Engel 1979 p. 157).

7Cf. T. Naph 8:3; T. Benj 10:10; Eccl. 10:19-22 for postbiblical motifs of the inclusion of Gentiles inGod’s economy.

8For an interesting case of analogy one may recall Charles Darwin, who recorded in The Origin ofSpecies that the hybrids were ‘perfectly fertile’ (I, 26).

9The casting out of the Garden in Genesis 3 puts in doubt the association of the Yahwist source withthe glory of the monarchy, and the jarring note on the expulsion has led some revisionists to positthe exilic date for the Yahwist altogether (John Blenkinsopp 1992 p. 66; John Van Seters 1992 pp.107-129). See also Lothar Perlitt (1969), John Van Seters (1975), Hans Heinrich Schmid (1976) forthe late dating of the Yahwist on different grounds.

10Kenney does not limit his interpretation to the United Monarchy, as the allegory he proposes wouldapply to any monarchic period.

11Angelica Bammer, editor, Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question logs the paths of moderndislocations as formative forces of constructed cultural identities (Bammer 1994). In the Afterwords(‘Frontlines/Borderposts’, pp. 269-272) he contributed to the volume, Bhabha extols the ‘move awayfrom the singularities of “class” or “gender” as primary conceptual and organizational categories’(p. 269).

12Interestingly enough, the introductory chapter of ‘Locations of Culture’ presages a more multifacetedobject of exploration (or even objects in the plural) than the title of the book may suggest. In anotherplace where he participates in the struggle over the problem of narrating the national life, Bhabhadeclares, ‘… the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporatingnew ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the

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political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces forpolitical representation’ (Bhabha 1990 p. 4).

13Bhabha uses the phrase to depict the ambivalence of mimicry. See also p. 89.

14Bhabha borrows the phrase from Jacques Derrida for ‘a figurative transference of meaning acrosslanguage systems’ (Bhabha 1994 p. 135).

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Bammer, Angelika, editor. Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington and Indianapolis:Indiana University Press; 1994.

Berquist, Jon. Judaism in Persia's Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach. Minneapolis, MN: FortressPress; 1995.

Best, Steven; Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press; 1991.Bhabha, Homi K., editor. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge; 1990.Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge; 1994.Bhabha, Homi K. ‘In a spirit of calm violence’. In: After Colonialism: Imperial Stories and Postcolonial

Displacements. Prakash, Gyan, editor. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press; 1995. pp.326–343.

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. London: SCMPress; 1992.

Bright, John. A History of Israel. 3rd edn. Philadelphia: Westminster Press; 1981.Davies, Philip R. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press;

1992. (JSOTSupp 148).Easthope, Anthony. Privileging Difference. Belsey, Catherine, editor. New York: Palgrave; 2002.Engel, Helmut, SJ. Die Vorfahren Israels in Ägypten: Forschungsgeschichtlicher Überblick über die

Darstellungen seit Richard Lepsius (1849). Frankfurter Theologische Studien 27. Frankfurt am Main:Josef Knecht; 1979.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books;1970.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books; 1978.Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press; 1998.Gottwald, Norman K. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050

BC. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis; 1979.Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge;

2001.Kennedy, James. ‘Peasants in revolt: political allegory in Genesis 2-3’. Journal for the Study of the Old

Testament 1990; 47: 3–14.Kwok, Pui-lan. Discovering the Bible in the Non-biblical World. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books; 1995.Lemke, Niels Peter. Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society. Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the

Old Testament Press; 1988. (The Biblical Seminar 5).Lenski, Gerhard. Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press; 1984.Levine, Baruch A. Leviticus: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia:

Jewish Publication Society; 1989. (The JPS Torah Commentary).Mettinger, Tryggve ND. In Search of God: The Meaning and Message of the Everlasting Names. Philadelphia:

Fortress Press; 1998.Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London and New York: Verso; 1997.Perlitt, Lothar. Bundestheologie im Alten Testament. Neukirchen Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag; 1969.

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Rad, Gerhard von. Old Testament Theology. Volume 1: The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions;Volume 2: The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions. New York: Harper; 1962–1965.

Runions, Erin. Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation and Future in Micah. London and New York: SheffieldAcademic Press; 2001.

Van Seters, John. Abraham in History and Tradition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 1975.Van Seters, John. Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis. Louisville, Kentucky:

Westerminster/John Knox Press; 1992.Schmid, Hans Heinrich. Der sogennnante Jahwist: Beobachtungen and Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung.

Zürich: Theologische Verlag; 1976.Segovia Fernando F. Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis

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University Press; 2002.Sugirtharajah, RS. Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing

Theology. London: SCM Press; 2003.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In: Marxism and the Interpretaton of Culture.

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Cite this article as: Han, Jin Hee. ‘Homi K. Bhabha and the mixed blessing of hybridity in biblical hermen-eutics’. The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2005. pp. 37.1–37.12. DOI: 10.2104/bc050037.

HOMI K. BHABHA ARTICLES37.12